The rise of memes

The other day I came to a realization. There is a massive amount of internet memes.

Don’t ask me why this phenomenon decided to hit me only a few days ago because I have absolutely no clue. Maybe it’s because I thought they were annoying and ridiculous at first. Maybe it was the fact that my Facebook newsfeed got trampled with memes. Or maybe it’s because I find most of them to be absolutely hilarious and mildly awesome.

At any rate, I decided to look up some information about what they are, how they got started and how they started trending. First, you should know how to pronounce it (MEEM). And in the simplest sense, they are photos edited with funny captions that appeals to the traits of the character in the photo. Second, memes have actually been around for a while. Memes first became popular posts to reblog on Tumblr and are now coming to larger social media sites like Facebook. And due to the fact that it’s easy to generate a meme, they can easily go viral – especially using university memes.

Another interesting observation I made while searching about memes was that several advertisers have caught on to the meme phenomenon and have used them to advertise their products. Talk about quick, easy and cheap advertising – and some memes use spelling errors, which means less editing for them (this could be a Success Kid meme!).

Other popular internet memes include LOLcats, Philosoraptor and Y U No Guy